BEIJING -- She nearly had the gold in her hand, but couldn't close her fist around it.

Instead, Hyleas Fountain earned the bronze medal in the women's heptathlon yesterday at the Olympics.

"Sometimes in the heptathlon, you have to take the good with the bad or the bad with the good," she said. "I did a lot of that this week, and I'm proud to win the bronze medal."

She ran a personal-best 2 minutes, 15.45 seconds in the final event, the 800-meter run, to finish with 6,619 points. Ukranian Nataliia Dobrynska won the gold with 6,733 points and Lyudmila Blonska, also of the Ukraine, earned the silver with 6,700.

Fountain, a Central Dauphin East High School graduate whose track career started at age 7 in Pennsylvania summer leagues, is the only American woman to win an Olympic medal in heptathlon besides Jackie Joyner-Kersee, who won gold in 1988 and 1992, and a silver in 1984.

In her first Olympics, Fountain, 27, who lives in Kettering, Ohio, had a great first day and was leading going into the final three events.

She struggled in her specialty, the long jump, in which she won the NCAA title for Georgia in 2004. Twice she fouled before finally getting a distance of 6.38 meters on her final attempt. That dropped her into second place.

"That never happened to me before," she said of the fouls. "I felt like it was a test to see if I can really come through. I just had to sit down and calm myself down."

It didn't get better in the javelin, where she was off the leaders' marks with a distance of 41.93 meters.

That left her clinging to second place, but she needed the race of her life in the 800 to medal since that was not her strongest event. It was a specialty for the four or five women just above and below her in the points standings.

"I never lost hope the whole time. I saw myself in the game the whole time," Fountain said. "I knew I would have to PR [in the 800] to get on the medal stand, so I just tried to give it my all."

When the times were tabulated and the points and medals sorted, Fountain took an emotional victory lap with several of her competitors.